If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Comment

What is this about? Some conspiracy? Google could not find anything explaining why this is so interesting.

the tapes themselves were confidential, the point hardly was...
there's no conspiracy - anyone following IT field press back in the days (early 90's - yeah, before the advent of Google*) can remember at some point NT was touted as "the next unix"(**), with everyone and their mother seriously considering migrating to it (at least for workstations and servers), or adopting side by side with their own platform
(starting with SGI and DEC - Mips and Alpha were the first non x86 architectures to see the Os ported - but also PPC server vendors)

* it's not like what google doesnt index has never existed eh...

** and actually, apart from being based on more modern concepts (regardless of implementation problems -bugs) than an OS rooted in the 70's, being the same OS developed by only one company, with the same API's across architectures (with just the HAL kernel layer adapted) NT would have been more of a cross vendor unifying platform than unix itself (which had already fragmented due to every vendor having his own version, with different kernel- and user-level specifics)

Comment

the tapes themselves were confidential, the point hardly was...
there's no conspiracy - anyone following IT field press back in the days (early 90's - yeah, before the advent of Google*) can remember at some point NT was touted as "the next unix"(**), with everyone and their mother seriously considering migrating to it (at least for workstations and servers), or adopting side by side with their own platform
(starting with SGI and DEC - Mips and Alpha were the first non x86 architectures to see the Os ported - but also PPC server vendors)

* it's not like what google doesnt index has never existed eh...

** and actually, apart from being based on more modern concepts (regardless of implementation problems -bugs) than an OS rooted in the 70's, being the same OS developed by only one company, with the same API's across architectures (with just the HAL kernel layer adapted) NT would have been more of a cross vendor unifying platform than unix itself (which had already fragmented due to every vendor having his own version, with different kernel- and user-level specifics)

If you look at Microsoft struggling right now, who knew? If that took off, they would probably still dominate. Thanks for the pointer. And yes, I'm well aware that there was a time before Google started indexing thank you .

Technically, they just hired the best engineers VMS had to offer, and had them build NT. Lets not forget, NT *used* to support architectures like PPC, SPARC, DEC Alpha, and the like. As those architectures died, MSFT simply dropped support for them to increase the processing speed of x86. But at release? Yes, NT was a significant threat to Unix based systems.

Linux basically fills that niche now though. MSFT REALLY needs to streamline the OS at some point.

Comment

Struggling? Hardly. It's still a very profitable company, even with the many failed products.

It's only afloat because everyone uses Office documents and Silverlight. I had to install Office 2007 on our main Arch machine to make it usable. They only have profit because they use vendor lockin. That's all. You can see this in their failure to get a hold in the mobile and tabletmarket. And I have yet to see other appliances ran by Windows.